As technology progresses, users are becoming more demanding and expect faster access to remote services when using electronic devices.
As an example, when a mobile electronic device user sees an advertisement with a URI indicating that more information or a competition etc can be found on the internet, they may be discouraged from accessing the service provided by the URI because typing in the URI is a slow, cumbersome and error prone, especially with small mobile devices, as is the correction process when an error is made.
EP1312066 improves the speed of access to a URI by a user. It discloses an advertisement system in which an advertiser device, containing an advertisement that is directly perceptible to a user of a nearby consumer device without mediation of the consumer device, downloads using Bluetooth an identification of an advertisement, e.g. a URI, to the consumer device for enabling subsequent download and upload of data to and from the consumer device. It is silent as to how the URI is transferred from the advertiser device to the consumer device using Bluetooth.
When a user of a first Bluetooth device wishes to obtain access to a service offered by a local device, the first Bluetooth device initiates an Device Discovery (inquiry) procedure to discover which devices are in range. The Bluetooth devices within range respond with an inquiry response including their Bluetooth Device Address. The first Bluetooth device then pages, in turn, each of the devices that are in range and requests the device's user-friendly name using the ‘Name Discovery’ procedure. Name Discovery provides an initiator with the Bluetooth Device Name of a connectable devices (i.e. a device within range that will respond to paging). The initiator device sends a LMP_name_req message to a connectable device which responds with an LMP_name_res message containing a Bluetooth Device Name. The Bluetooth Device Name is a user-friendly character string associated with a device and consists of a maximum of 248 bytes and is encoded using UTF-8. After obtaining all the names, the first Bluetooth device then starts the Service Discovery Protocol (SDP). It interrogates the other devices to determine if any of them are candidates for providing a service. The other devices reply with an indication of the services that are provided and the protocols that are used. The service provided is indicated using service attributes including a service name. The list of candidate devices is then displayed to the user of the first device. The user-friendly names obtained via Name Discovery are used to identify the candidate devices and the user can consequently make an informed selection of which device should be used to provide the required service. The full link establishment procedure is only then performed with the selected device.
The Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) provides a mechanism for discovering services and their attributes. A service is any entity that can provide information, perform an action or control a resource on behalf of another entity. All of the information about a service is contained in a single service record that consists of a list of service attributes.
One way of providing a URI from one Bluetooth device to another Bluetooth device is by placing it in one of the service attributes of a service record maintained at the advertiser device. The URI would then be transferred during the SDP.
However, the inventors have realized that the process of connecting to each connectable device to request its user-friendly name (the ‘Name Request’ procedure) is time consuming. Each connection requires a paging procedure which can take up to 2.5 seconds. Therefore there may be some delay in initiating the Service Discovery Protocol and gaining access to the required service.
It would be desirable to improve the speed at which a user can access a service using a mobile device.